Recently, laser welding of austenitic stainless steel has received great attention in industry, due to its wide spread application in petroleum refinement stations, power plant, pharmaceutical industry and households. Therefore, mechanical properties should be controlled to obtain good welded joints. The welding process should be optimized by the proper mathematical models. In this research, the tensile strength and impact strength along with the joint operating cost of laser welded butt joints made of AISI304 was investigated. Design-expert software was used to establish the design matrix and to analyze the experimental data. The relationships between the laser welding parameters (laser power, welding speed and focal point position) and the three responses (tensile strength, impact strength and joint operating cost) were established. Also, the optimization capabilities in design-expert software were used to optimise the welding process. The developed mathematical models were tested for adequacy using analysis of variance and other adequacy measures. In this investigation the optimal welding conditions were identified in order to increase the productivity and minimize the total operating cost. Overlay graphs were plotted by superimposing the contours for the various response surfaces. The process parameters effect was determined and the optimal welding combinations were tabulated.